Sunday, October 22, 2006

Creating a Balance

One of the areas where Beermogul excelled was in it's ability to be played in less than 3 minutes a day. Players could put in a small amount of upfront effort (10-20 mins), then their properties could look after themselves - a small amount of maintenance every now & then was enough to keep things running along (perhaps one of the most attractive elements of the game). The emails that were produced every three days reported on progress, and drew players back to the game (traffic stats closely followed the email distribution schedule).

The downside of this was a lack of game depth. If players wanted to invest more time they would struggle to find things to do and get bored (usually resulting in malicious activities!).

OK, so before I can continue talking about this I need to make an announcement...

BEERMOGUL IS COMING BACK!

We're working on a rebuild of the game in more modern technology. How will we overcome the problems that led to the downfall of the original version? We'll give you more information on that later - oh, and we want your input on it too.

One of the things we're looking to do with the rebuild of the service is to add more depth to the game without sacrificing the simplicity of the original. How are we going to do it? We're not really sure! While the first release is likely to be very similar to the old game (in terms of functionality), we've got some ideas about how we'll add more depth and variability, but we want your input to work out if we're on the right track.

Here are some of the things that we're thinking about...

Geography: Users will be able to decide where their property is going to be located. Property will vary in price based on attributes such as population density, average income etc in order to introduce more in-game variability.

Brewers are special: In the original game anyone could become a brewer at any stage - all they had to do was to purchase a brewery which was about the same cost as a pub. That's not really how things work in the real world - there tends to be a lot more pubs than there is brewers. Under this proposal there would be a strictly limited number of brewers (say 5 per 10,000 pubs). Brewery owners would not be allowed to own pubs, but would obviously have a lot more potential to earn money than a pub owner. Brewers would be a kind of "super user", but with power comes responsibility - they would be governed by a special set of rules (one of the most obvious is the need for regular participation - without this brewing licenses will be revoked).

The Beermogul Plus Pack: Want to unlock special new and unusual features, properties and designs? By purchasing a Beermogul plus pack players could unlock new game elements and receive some cool BM merchandise at the same time (OK so I'm trying to sneak a bit of a commercial model in here too).

We'll reveal more of our ideas as we get closer to launch, but this should be enough to keep everyone busy for a while (feel free to provide your feedback via comments).